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Further: If Matter were susceptible of modification, it must
acquire something by the incoming of the new state; it will
either adopt that state, or, at least, it will be in some way
different from what it was. Now upon this first incoming quality
suppose a second to supervene; the recipient is no longer Matter
but a modification of Matter: this second quality, perhaps,
departs, but it has acted and therefore leaves something of
itself after it; the substratum is still further altered. This
process proceeding, the substratum ends by becoming something
quite different from Matter; it becomes a thing settled in many
modes and many shapes; at once it is debarred from being the
all-recipient; it will have closed the entry against many
incomers. In other words, the Matter is no longer there: Matter
is destructible.
No: if there is to be a Matter at all, it must be always
identically as it has been from the beginning: to speak of Matter
as changing is to speak of it as not being Matter.
Another consideration: it is a general principle that a thing
changing must remain within its constitutive Idea so that the
alteration is only in the accidents and not in the essential
thing; the changing object must retain this fundamental
permanence, and the permanent substance cannot be the member of
it which accepts modification.
Therefore there are only two possibilities: the first, that
Matter itself changes and so ceases to be itself, the second that
it never ceases to be itself and therefore never changes.
We may be answered that it does not change in its character as
Matter: but no one could tell us in what other character it
changes; and we have the admission that the Matter in itself is
not subject to change.
Just as the Ideal Principles stand immutably in their essence-
which consists precisely in their permanence- so, since the
essence of Matter consists in its being Matter [the substratum to
all material things] it must be permanent in this character;
because it is Matter, it is immutable. In the Intellectual realm
we have the immutable Idea; here we have Matter, itself similarly
immutable.
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